Method · the WealthAge Resilience Score
How the WealthAge Resilience Score is validated
The WealthAge Resilience Score™ is a personal 0–1000 measure of how prepared your current financial picture is for a financial shock. It works like a credit score, one number you own and watch, but it answers your question, not a lender's: if the income stopped, how long would you stand? Instead of averaging opinions, it simulates a shock against your real finances (what you could actually access, what keeps draining, what income would replace) across six determinants: liquid runway, income adequacy, committed costs, debt service, income replacement, and protective context. It was validated on the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, where it predicted real hardship better than savings-runway alone. We publish the method and show your reason codes; we don't publish the machinery. It's informational and yours: not a credit score, consumer report, lending input, or guarantee.
By Steven Sterling, who built it: the score, the engine, and the validation study.
WealthAge Resilience Score · specimen
illustrative fixture, not a real user · every score ships with its reason codes, exactly like this
The engine · seven steps
What the simulation does
The engine doesn't grade your habits. It runs the shock, step by step, the same way for every household.
What the score weighs
The six determinants
Liquid runway (weighs heaviest) · income adequacy · committed costs · debt service · income replacement (including AI-occupation exposure) · protective context (weighs lightest). Whenever your score is shown, you see each determinant's direction and which weighs heaviest and lightest for you. Your reason codes, always.
Illustrative fixture sub-scores, not weights and not a real user, shown to make the ordering (heaviest to lightest) visible instead of only stated in prose.
The evidence
How we know it works
The model was validated on the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP): 24,162 real households: their 2022 finances against whether they actually hit hardship in 2023. Given two households, one of which hits hardship, the months-of-expenses rule picks the right one 64% of the time; the simulation picks it 72% of the time. In formal terms, AUC 0.717 against 0.640. The protocol, for the skeptical reader: the model was fit and evaluated on held-out households it never saw during calibration, and AUC measures exactly the pairwise comparison above, so 0.5 is a coin flip and 1.0 is omniscience. 0.717 beats the rule of thumb's 0.640 on the same held-out data. Better than the rule of thumb, and honestly short of an oracle, which is why every score carries a confidence read based on how complete your data is. Income is not resilience: in our fixture gallery, an $18k-a-month over-committed earner scores 422 while a modest, disciplined saver scores 814. Every example number on this site (687, 5.2 months, 422, 814) is an illustrative fixture, never a real user.
| Predicting real hardship, 2022 → 2023 | AUC |
|---|---|
| WealthAge Resilience Score | 0.717 |
| Months-of-savings rule of thumb | 0.640 |
| Coin flip | 0.500 |
AUC measures how often the instrument ranks a household that later hit hardship as more fragile than one that didn't. 1.0 would be an oracle; 0.5 is chance.
| Income is not resilience | Score |
|---|---|
| $18k/month, over-committed earner | 422 |
| Modest income, disciplined saver | 814 |
Fixture personas from the published gallery, not real users.
The boundary
What we publish, and what we don't
That is the same boundary every serious score keeps.
The disclaimers, plainly
What the score is not
It describes your position; what you do with it is yours.
A living number
How the score stays current
Your score recomputes from your latest successfully synced or uploaded data, and every score surface carries its as-of time. Structural facts like occupation, insurance, and dependents change on life events, not daily. A separate, dated monthly Macro Climate read on the world is shown beside your number, never blended into it: when a scenario reading moves on macro alone, your finances didn't change. The world did.